User talk:Various Pickles
= "My" New Wiki = I haven't done much work here recently because I've been working on a wiki, Hardware Mods Wiki, for my main hobby (and sometimes work), custom computer system building. Its a total work in progress so the wiki is occasionally totally broken, but its getting there. Hopefully, once I finish I'll be able to reverse-integrate the code back here in some way... Re: Addition of Raw Data I like what you've done. I think it reads better having the new info at the bottom, as you've done. The only thing I can't remember is what the little star means here "Heal %: (100.0 + Spellpower) * 0.4 ". I'm sure it's a math term I can't recall, but if you could maybe add a note somewhere describing what it means it might help people like me. Thanks so much for your contributions. Loleil 05:41, November 30, 2009 (UTC) Gameplay data I just want to say THANK YOU for all the work you've been doing. It makes the wiki so much more helpful, and also helps people (or at least me!) understand the game better. :) And yes, you have made the Talent/Spell pages so much more organized. *loves orderly things* - Ancestralmask 21:23, December 3, 2009 (UTC) : There's still soooooo much more to do :D. It'll be pretty awesome when its done, for sure. I tend to think that there are a lot of D&D-esque min-maxers out there who love playing the game as a giant statistical problem. I'm certainly one of them. --Various Pickles 21:32, December 3, 2009 (UTC) :: Hahah, I tend to play the game as "whack it until it's dead," although the PC version of the game is forcing me to pay more attention to what I'm doing. But I love reading up on things and becoming an expert anyway. - Ancestralmask 21:44, December 3, 2009 (UTC) Re: Game Data vs. Lore and Other Random Information That is definitely a problem the wiki has do deal with as we grow. Pre-release, many of the wikis articles were built solely on the Codex entries BioWare released. Now we have the game and toolset for ourselves, I would certainly like the wiki provide a unique source of information, not just carbon copies of the manual, or codex. That being said, I think we still need to provide something that is accessible to beginners, and people who don't have an interest in mechanics. I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but pages like Warrior, or rogue I think provide a good introduction to the class. There is certainly room for expansion and improvement, but I think it's important to cover the basics too. I'd actually been considering merging Arcane Warrior Spellcasting into Arcane Warrior, if you can keep all the important information I think it could be moved into a new location. It looks like it was largely the work of User:SkyeNiTessine, so perhaps you could discuss any changes with them, to see how attached they are to it? So I suppose what I'm trying to say is I'd like to keep a basic prose introduction providing an overview of the class, as well as including the fantastically detailed mechanics you've been adding. As a side note, would you object to the re-introduction of contents tables on the spells pages? I think there is a place for a full list of spells, and to provide people with the ability to jump to a particular spell. Loleil 23:53, December 3, 2009 (UTC) : I'm putting back the TOCs - guess people like them. --Various Pickles 00:08, December 4, 2009 (UTC) Re: Template Troubles Sadly no. I'm not hugely familiar with programming code and I can't see what would be causing this either. You might like to ask User:Pwr905, or User:Tierrie, who both possess a far greater understanding of coding and programming language than I do. Perhaps this is something this Pwr905's bot can deal with if there is solution to be found? Sorry I couldn't offer greater assistance. Loleil 00:11, December 5, 2009 (UTC) :Thanks for your message! I'm afraid I'm no template expert either - just a newbie - though I agree it would be great to implement them on the spell pages. (I was actually thinking of a SpellInfoBox like the ItemInfoBoxes that are being implemented for all items, and that was used as the inspiration for the Template:CodexInfoBox that I've been working with.) Other than that, I've no better suggestion than Loleil's that you ask User:Pwr905, User:Tierrie or User:Mytharox (who helped me!) --Zoev 11:19, December 17, 2009 (UTC) :Oops! We were obviously writing on each other's talk pages at the same time! Great work on spells, by the way and I definitely agree it's much more useful than Talents currently is. --Zoev 11:40, December 17, 2009 (UTC) Rich Text/Other Stuff Hi. My initial feeling is that it might be related to the Rich-Text Editor that is optionally usable to edit the pages. Try disabling it under Preferences->Editing. Once you do this, things may look a little different in that it will be just wikicode when you edit a page. If you've already done this or that doesn't work, then we can move on to seeing if it might be the templates themselves. - Pwr905 16:04, December 19, 2009 (UTC) : I actually only edit the wikicode - I didn't know you could disable the wysiwyg editor :D. I'll try that first. I've set up the templates pretty carefully to have s where appropriate, so I hope its not the templates themselves... Overall, <3 for your help. --Various Pickles 17:19, December 19, 2009 (UTC) : If it is the richtext editing that's screwing things up, is there a way to auto-redirect other users who are editing to the wikicode version? --Various Pickles 17:25, December 19, 2009 (UTC) Removal of picture in Primal Spells Just curious as to why you removed the picture. That area is currently dead space, so I felt a picture improved the appearance, what was your thinking in its removal? Loleil 00:25, December 20, 2009 (UTC) : I wrote out a preemptive answer on Talk:Primal Spells :D I try not to revert peoples' edits right away, but it borked stuff. --Various Pickles 00:28, December 20, 2009 (UTC) : ...but the one you just added to Spirit Spells worked out nice. Still, I think my idea of spell-specific screenies could be pretty cool. --Various Pickles 00:30, December 20, 2009 (UTC) ::Just responded on Primal Spells, and I like the idea of a screenshot for all spells too. Loleil 00:35, December 20, 2009 (UTC) Re: Rich Text Editor, Tough Decisions That seems like a fair guess on Pwr905's part, I don't use the rich text editor as I think it creates far more problems than it solves, though thankfully Pwr905 has his bot set up to undo some of the more common problems it causes. As to templates, my understanding is that the two styles are set up to be compatible, so people can use the rich text editor to edit any template, no matter how it was created, so feel free to create any new templates in the style you prefer. And no, there isn't a category for core problems (or if there is I haven't discovered it :p). If it turns out to be something wrong there, it will be off to contact the wiki staff. Loleil 01:17, December 20, 2009 (UTC) : The problem isn't from editing the templates in the RTE (not that that really works considering the tags), that works as well as it should. The problem is when I use the templates, save the page, then go back in to edit it in the RTE. The moment I do, shit hits the fan. I don't even have to change anything lol. : If you would like a first hand demonstration, try uncommenting the template calls in Primal Spells, specifically right under Flame Blast. Save the page, edit it again (in RTE), and enjoy the multiplying (oh yes) empty paragraphs . --Various Pickles 01:25, December 20, 2009 (UTC) ::Gotcha. I think I might let Tierrie (template genius) take it from here to help work things out. Loleil 01:38, December 20, 2009 (UTC) :::I took a closer look at how you're implementing it and there are several things I would change. The first and most important one is that you're using 6 templates to do what only requires 1 template. Here's how I would implement it in the "style" that you're currently using. An example of it working the Flame Blast and Flaming Weapon style is as follows :::Having said that - I will be revamping the Talent section "soon". There has got to be a far better way to present the data. It needs to be compact so we can see at least 5 skills without scrolling. Presents all the data in a visually recognizable format. And its layout needs to be includeable in any of the other pages. --Tierrie 11:10, December 20, 2009 (UTC) ::::I know that I could do it in one template, and some of it is superfluous, but the amount of parameters to a single template would be huge. Look at Blizzard to get a sense of the amount / complexity of the ability data. This is before I add the AoEs, screenshots (Loleil's idea), patch data, etc. Also, when I say "abilities" I mean both spells and talents, since in essence they are identical except for their "fuel". Thus, they would use the same templates. ::::Perhaps some sort of table would work? It could be four entries across just like the ingame ability trees... Anyway, I'll take a look at my templates and make sure everything is together. Thanks for your help, as always ::::--Various Pickles 14:54, December 20, 2009 (UTC) Hypergalactic Ability Editing I'm set to embark on a massive series of edits to the abilities (spells and talents) sections. First, I'm going to get my templates working. I've decided to use one template (see Template:Ability), with a lot of logic, to generate all the parts of an ability description, as Tierrie suggested. For all those interested, I'll be progressively testing the template in Ability Template Tester to avoid messing up the actual pages (poor Flame Blast ). Wish me luck and please hold off on any massive edits of your own (cough Tierrie cough), at least for a bit. Thanks. --Various Pickles 18:24, December 20, 2009 (UTC) :Just noticed this. Will hold off editing anything till you get a template worked out. --WAH 07:17, December 22, 2009 (UTC) Would like to help Hi I would like to help you add more information to the talent pages. I'll try to follow the format that you've used on the spell pages. I can work on some of the weapon talents tonight but there are still things I am unsure of like how some talents effect attack speed. Let me know what you're working on when you can so we both don't end up doing the same things. Thanks. --WAH 07:17, December 22, 2009 (UTC) Re: Re: Re: Redirects Perhaps what you might be looking for is the . Under Double Redirects, Broken Redirects or Dead-End Links --Tierrie 18:43, December 23, 2009 (UTC) :Not as bad as I thought it would be . Really only found one - go figure. --Various Pickles 00:17, December 24, 2009 (UTC) Re: Additional Extensions After a bit of investigating I don't think I can actually install these. If I read the files correctly, it looks like they all need be installed on Localsettings.php, and this is a file I can't access. However, our trusty staff member User:JoePlay might be able to help you out. I can edit the MediaWiki:Common.css and the MediaWiki:Common.js if you want changes made there, and if you need any redirects deleted I can definitely do that! Loleil 23:02, December 23, 2009 (UTC) : I'll talk to JoePlay - I don't really have much of an understanding about how the whole wikia system works. As I understand it, all the extensions (included ParserFunctions, ScriptFunctions, etc. that we have installed) were developed "by" (open source?) them. As long as it doesn't place too much of a drain on the servers / pose a security risk, shouldn't they be willing to let us use their own extensions? : Anyway, I'm currently (re)writing some really nifty, super low-level templates (see Category:Utility Templates) to make what little coding functionality I have be easy to use (documented yay!) and hopefully efficient enough to not take down the wiki once 1k people are browsing abilities . : Common files = totally awesome . I can do a tremendous amount of really cool (incredibly useful, not just gimmicky) stuff with just a bit of DHTML. On that note, its probably MediaWiki:Monaco.css (its the skin/theme being used, right?) that I would wish to add to. I know you can't just let me go at it, even though I'd be good , but I'm sure we can figure something out. : I haven't really finished figuring out the best way to do the templates, so I'm probably going to go back to making then deleting or renaming 100 more templates lol. I'll hunt the redirects down someday, don't worry. :--Various Pickles 00:13, December 24, 2009 (UTC) ::Yeah I couldn't find a rationale, just that a lot of affiliate sites couldn't edit that source, but it looks you're getting your templates to work well anyway. I'm always open to suggestions about any pages and if it's a simple addition I'm happy to hear what you've got planned, though if you want an in-depth discussion about the CSS or javascript pages you might want to talk to Tierrie or Pwr905. My understanding of those sort of things is limited and I've stayed away from editing there for fear of causing the site to implode :p. Loleil 01:27, December 24, 2009 (UTC)